Luis C. Cano is an associate professor in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures. He specializes in Contemporary Latin American Literature with emphasis on Spanish American popular genres. His book Intermitente recurrencia: La ciencia ficción y el canon literario hispanoamericano [Intermittent Recurrence: Science Fiction and the Spanish American Literary Canon] has become an indispensable reference for understanding the development of Spanish American science fiction in the past 150 years.
In his current project, a manuscript tentatively entitled Literatura canónica y géneros populares: Periodización literaria y autorreferencialidad en la nueva narrativa latinoamericana, Cano explores the major developments in three genres of popular Latin American and Caribbean literature during the past 30 years: science fiction, fantasy and detective fiction. The manuscript discusses the artistic choices of a young group of writers who have selected the so-called popular genres to explore, analyze and comment on the influence of the celebrated Boom generation as a way to insert themselves in the mainstream canon of Latin American literature.
As part of this new project, Cano recently published two articles:“Cárcel de árboles de Rodrigo Rey Rosa y la Meta-Ciencia-Ficción” [Meta-Science Fiction in The Pelcari Project by Rodrigo Rey Rosa] in the special issue of Revista Iberoamericana: La ciencia-ficción en América Latina: entre la mitología experimental y lo que vendrá (Spring 2012); and “No estamos solos. La ciencia ficción y la tradición Literaria en Hispanoamérica [We are Not Alone: Science Fiction and Literary Tradition in Spanish America] in Revista Cronopio (August 2012). A third article titled “Feminización de la violencia en Rosario Tijeras” [Feminization of Violence in Rosario Tijeras], will be included in an upcoming number of Hispanófila, a peer reviewed journal published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.